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‘Above all, make lots of Barbers!’ Beethoven is said to have told Rossini when the two men met in Vienna in 1822. Beethoven may have had doubts about the ability of this new young Italian-born superstar to write operas on heavyweight subjects (Rossini had already written quite a few) but he clearly threw his cap in the air when he encountered The Barber of Seville, the dazzling two-act opera buffa (comic opera) Rossini had written from Rome in 1816 at the age of 23. Its verve, originality and detonations of comic energy have all the hallmarks of one of Beethoven’s own more rumbustious works.

The opera was based on the comedy Le Barbier de Séville which the French entrepreneur-turned-playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron – or Beaum0archais as he renamed himself – had written in 1775. Such was its popularity and that of its sequel Le Mariage de Figaro, that both works were quickly turned into operas: the first by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello, whose setting of the Barber became one of the most frequently revived operas of the age, the second by Mozart whose Figaro enjoyed rather more modest success with contemporary audiences after its premiere in Vienna in 1786.

Rossini had no designs on Mozart’s Figaro. As he later said, “Mozart was the admiration of my youth, the desperation of my mature years and the consolation of my old age.” But Paisiello was fair game. In Rossini’s view his treatment of the eponymous barber was far too sedate.

Danielle de Niese and Björn BürgerCredit:
Bill Cooper

How long Rossini had been plotting his own version of the Barber it’s impossible to say, though when the opportunity came during the carnival season in Rome in 1816, he seized the moment. Out of deference to the elderly Paisiello, Rossini changed the title to Almaviva, the name of one of the characters. Not that this helped. The opera’s first night was wrecked by a hired claque of Paisiello followers, ably assisted by local bovver boys and an underprepared cast that was more than usually accident-prone – one of the performers, for instance, tripped on a loose board, broke his nose, and had to sing while trying to staunch the flow of blood.

The following day Rossini wrote to his mother: “Oh what mad things, what extraordinary things, are seen in this country. But I can tell you that, in the midst of all of this, my music is very fine and already people are talking about its second performance when the music will be heard.” The second night was indeed a triumph, though Rossini, who had a congenital fear of any kind of violence, wasn’t there to enjoy it.

However radical his music – and the Barber is arguably the most radical of all his operas – Rossini was a kindly, conservative-minded soul who preferred to observe from a distance humanity’s follies and intrigues. Born into a time of war and revolution, he was acutely aware of the thinness of the ice on which civilisation skates, as we can hear in those whirring “stop the world I want to get off” Act 1 finales, as the characters desperately try to work out who is duping whom.

Part of the genius of the original play lay in the skill with which a familiar plot – lascivious elderly gentleman fancies pretty teenage ward who has eyes only for a rich and handsome young buck – is given new life by the resourcefulness of the character who stage-manages the action, the young buck’s erstwhile valet, Figaro.

Gioachino Rossini

Even before Rossini laid hands on it, the play had its own extraordinary energy. When Beaumarchais describes Dr Bartolo, the ageing lothario with designs on his ward, as a “stoutish, shortish, oldish, greyish, cunning, smarmy, posing, nosing, peeping, crying, creeping, whining, snivelling sort of man”, he is offering precisely the kind of manic energy Rossini was looking to exploit.

The opera’s vitality shines through in Figaro’s explosive entrance aria. A century and a half later, Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson used it for a 1979 television ad for the Fiat Strada, a sporty hatchback marketed with the strapline “handbuilt by robots, driven by Italians”. Who better to promote the sparky new car and the oh-so-clever robots that built it than Rossini’s Figaro: the general factotum who is as manoeuvrable and speedy as any hot-hatch?

Like Beethoven, Rossini’s taciturn successor Giuseppe Verdi harboured doubts about some of Rossini’s grander work but he loved the Barber. “For abundance of ideas, comic verve, and truth of declamation, I cannot help believing that it is the most beautiful opera buffa in existence,” he wrote. Coming from the composer of Falstaff, arguably the greatest comic opera of all, that is no mean tribute.

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